Peak Big Meeting.

Let me first concede: other people have jobs that are just as hard, or harder, than mine. More tedious, onerous, meeting-filled, snackless, and so on. My incipient whining, therefore, allows for all of this, which to say that this is, perhaps, recreational whining. Whining to while the time away. I'm in a long meeting, I'm saying, and I'm blogging. Weight this whine, therefore, as you see fit.

However:

We are here in a big room, at round tables, talking about a thing called 'meta-majors.' Which may or may not be a thing that helps our students in realizing their educational goals. But we're going to do them, and what that means--doing them--is both the text and the subtext of what we're talking about.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I'm telling you that this conversation is simultaneously prickly, spark-y, flammable, Babel-like in its tendency to have people speaking different languages at each other. I'm telling you that I am simultaneously engaged and also checking all my social media in a somewhat irritable manner. I'm telling you that the ideas of what education is for are various, are multitudinous, can be divided into Same and Other and are also etcetera.

Also, the snacks are all the way across the room.

BIG MEETING. 

I'm saying, it's week 4 and it is already meeting meeting meeting meeting.

I'm saying I'm already four weeks behind.

SIGH, is all I'm saying.

This meeting will last exactly nine more minutes, nine more minutes in which I will finish and publish this blog post, contemplate how I have been rejected, poetry-wise, a healthy and robust number of times as of late, think about how I am hungry about a billion times, and, in a related matter, how I am going to make baked pasta for dinner and how delicious that is no doubt going to be. Will these thoughts take up the remaining nine minutes, where a practically infinite number of people will say what they think about 'completion' and 'meta-majors' and 'the purpose of an education'? Probably not. Thoughts about dinner and hunger and rejection are both eternal and fleeting, when the big meeting is still in progress.

The chill and its recompense.

I realized that I had a midday meeting downtown when I was still lying in bed.

[I realize that it's a little early in the post for a digression, but:]

DIGRESSION: It is not a good habit to be checking one's phone before one has arisen from one's bed. I keep reading this. It's like, basically, inviting the Stress Fairy in for a snuggle. And yet I do. I do invite the Stress Fairy, aka my iPhone, into bed with me. It's terrible.

END of DIGRESSION.

Ugh. The meeting, I mean. Well, more the downtown-ness of the meeting, i.e., getting out of one's snuggery, aka, one's very own home where one was peaceably grading, and getting into the car and listening to the wind howling and driving when there's snow, &c &c it's the antithesis of the at-home-work-day I had planned in my mind before I checked my phone and saw that sneak attack of a meeting. Which was just fine, once I got there. Then there was the driving home. Midday meeting downtown, you'd be just fine except for the driving sandwich.

Even so, once I got home again, I had the presence of mind to put two cups of dried beans in water to boil then soak. I have like ten different kinds of legumes at my house. I don't know, precisely, what possesses me. These were Christmas beans, enormous and a lovely mottled color. I also have flageolets and black lentils and green lentils and garbanzos and some sort of black bean and cranberry beans and I think still some yellow Navajo beans? I don't know.

Well, if a cold day isn't a day for soup, I don't know what. So I graded some more, then worked out, then made chili.

I don't have an oven yet, so there was no cornbread, but there was toast, and there was whole milk yogurt and grated sharp Cheddar and cilantro to go with the chili, and dang if that wasn't the most fitting dinner ever for a mid-November day. Plus leftovers, which is but one of the saving graces of at-home-work-day, even with the interloping midday downtown meeting.

I cannot wait for that oven. Oh the baked goods that will issue therefrom!

Monday Tuesday Wednesday and the arbitrary cut off.

You know, we had a wedding over the weekend. And loads of family events of every stripe. I mean literally EVERY STRIPE, the people: dinner in the park, swimming, wedding dress shopping, travels to other states and more, I tell you, much much more, with a fabulous and rotating cast of characters. On Tuesday we met the rental guys at the empty indoor soccer venue so they could pick up the chairs tables tablecloths fancy arch. On Monday, I returned a tux. I am washing all the downstairs sheets as we speak.

I only say the above because this week, the week after the wedding, was to be the 'we're getting ready to go to Scotland' week. And it is--it is the 'we're getting ready to go to Scotland' week. I have made a list of what I'm packing:

That's 4 skirts and 8 shirts. I'm pretty sure this is the correct proportions.

I made this list at a strategic planning retreat on Monday. Because Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday had meetings galore. It was epic, for late July, when my ideal July plan included things like making toast and wearing white clothes and, you know, moving from one room to the next and fanning myself.

Even so, despite my being fully meetinged up for one two three days in a row, I decided to make an arbitrary cut off date. Wednesday--that's today, for those of you keeping score--is and was the last day I would accept meeting engagements before our Scotland trip. I would take meetings all the way till 4:30 on Wednesday, and after that no more. Why Wednesday? Well, there are reasons, and I am going to tell them to you:

1. I feel like seeing a movie with my auntie tomorrow.
2. I still need to go to Target. And Sephora.
3. My daughter needs me. SHE NEEDS ME.
4. There are events this weekend!
5. I need to see two movies with my beloved this weekend.
6. What about the sorry state of my study?
7. Washing the sheets.
8. Revise a poem.
9. Come up with an epigraph, maybe, a new one, for my manuscript.
10. Which I am sending out to five places.
11. Other reasons I am not thinking of at the moment but which are equally important as the previous ten.
12. I need to buy Jolly Ranchers and fruit snacks to take to Scotland.
13. Etc.

As you can see, I srsly don't have time to take more meetings. I am going to Scotland with my sneakers, two pairs, and my ballet flats and possibly a sandal! and my pile of black clothes and my two lenses! and my fruit snacks!

I am international. I am vacation preparation. I am at the movies and all about my suitcase and I taking my swimming suit so I can swim in an open air seawater pool. Elsewhere, is where I am. And therefore I just don't have the time, America, for your agendas and followups, your proposals and Google docs and updates. This is the arbitrary cutoff, and it means business.

Open letter to the phrase, "I will now entertain a motion to adjourn."

Dear the phrase, "I will now entertain a motion to adjourn,"

May I say that, at the conclusion of a meeting at the end of a long week, few words have ever sounded sweeter?

I observe now, many hours hence, that you have a lovely rhythm--like many great phrases, you start out anapestic and end up iambic,

which makes quite a fancy little dance out of an intent to bring proceedings to an end:

O the phrase "I will now entertain a motion to adjourn," you gratify equally in the hearing and the saying!

And upon my uttering the phrase "I will now entertain a motion to adjourn," the motions fell thick upon the ground, and we were agreed: the adjournment moved, seconded and concluded, executed as those present took up the call:

and thus word was deed:

the end, and we parted, and the meeting was no more.

It's very impressive how you do all that,

htms

The meeting.